Comments on: New W3C Document Standards for XHTML and RDFa

By: New HTML5 Drafts and Other W3C Developments « UK Web Focus

New HTML5 Drafts and Other W3C Developments « UK Web Focus — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 12:02:29 +0000

[...] in August 2010 in a post entitled New W3C Document Standards for XHTML and RDFa I described the latest release of RDFa Core 1.1 and XHTML+RDFa1.1 draft documents. The RDFa Working [...]

By: Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus)

Brian Kelly (UK Web Focus) — Wed, 15 Sep 2010 13:37:13 +0000

Hi Manu
Thanks for the comment.
When I searched for information about the W3C’s work on HTML5+RDFa I found this document – as there was no indication that there was a later version (I believe there is a policy that new versions of W3C documents should contain links to later versions) I wrote the post on the assumption that no later document had been published.
Thanks for pointing out that there is a more recent document – I have updated the post to link to the new version (although it seems that the W3C document I referenced still does not contain a link to a later document).
When you state that “HTML will be a container for data, that is the direction that the entire web community is taking, whether it is Microformats, Microdata or RDFa” I would like to see evidence that this is the direction that the entire web community is taking – “the entire web community” is a very large community!

By: Newsletter for August 2010 « UKOLN Update

Newsletter for August 2010 « UKOLN Update — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 15:08:54 +0000

[...] New W3C Document Standards for XHTML and RDFa [...]

By: Manu Sporny

Manu Sporny — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 18:17:18 +0000

The answer to this question is not (yet) clear. The W3C have published a ”HTML5+RDFa: A mechanism for embedding RDF in HTML” working draft document – but this was released in July 2009 and hasn’t been updated since.

Gah! Brian, there are two big issues with your article:

HTML+RDFa has been updated on a regular basis since the date on the document that you linked to re HTML5+RDFa. The link that you point to is a very old draft. Just do a Google search for “HTML+RDFa” and the first hit is the link to the newest draft. A new working draft for HTML+RDFa (which includes both HTML4 and HTML5) was released just a little over two months ago, on June 24th 2010:

The Latest HTML+RDFa Working Draft

This is what is called a recommendation-track document – we plan on eventually publishing it as a Web standard after it has had enough public, community and Working Group review. The path forward for RDFa in HTML4, HTML5, XHTML1 and XHTML5 is very clear – it is RDFa 1.1 and that technology covers all of the HTML family languages. Please correct this in your article!

The other issue in the story is that you quote this sentence repeatedly:

Implementors who are not taking part in the discussions are likely to find the specification changing out from under them in incompatible ways.

This is boilerplate text – as a Working Group at the World Wide Web Consortium, we are required to put that text into every Editors draft and every Working Draft that we produce. It is a clear indicator that the document isn’t a Web standard yet and that people should be careful when implementing that particular document. It doesn’t mean that “the future is uncertain”.

That said – RDFa 1.0 is a Web Standard, and while it is only officially defined to XHTML1 at the moment, we are designing RDFa 1.1 for HTML5 to work without any changes necessary. That means that if someone places RDFa 1.0 into an HTML5 document today, that it should work just fine with RDFa 1.1 and HTML5+RDFa processors once we finalize the RDFa 1.1 specifications (which will be in mid-to-late 2011).

To say that the future regarding use of HTML as a container for data seems to be somewhat uncertain is very misleading. HTML will be a container for data, that is the direction that the entire web community is taking, whether it is Microformats, Microdata or RDFa. Furthermore, RDFa is the only data-in-HTML language that is being designed to work across many languages – HTML4, XHTML1, HTML5, XHTML5, SVG and ODF are just the early adopters.

Please fix these two issues with your article, as it is very misleading and damages the hard work that the Microformats, Microdata and RDFa communities are doing to ensure that HTML can express linked data in a standards-compliant way.